Part 19

Once long ago an ocean lapped this hill, And where those vultures sail, ships sailed at will; Queer fishes cruised about without a harbor-- I will maintain there's queer fish round here still.

The Bad Lands Rubaiyat

Through the long days of that soft, green June, Roosevelt was making himself at home in his new and strange surroundings. A carpenter, whose name was the same as his trade, built him a bookcase out of scraps of lumber, and on the shelves of it he assembled old friends--Parkman and Irving and Hawthorne and Cooper and Lowell, "Ike Marvel's breezy pages and the quaint, pathetic character-sketches of the Southern writers--Cable, Craddock, Macon, Joel Chandler Harris, and sweet Sherwood Bonner." Wherever he went he carried some book or other about him, solid books as a rule, though he was not averse on occasion to what one cowpuncher, who later became superintendent of education in Medora, and is therefore to be regarded as an authority, reproachfully described as "trash." He consumed the "trash," it seems, after a session of composition, which was laborious to him, and which set him to stalking to and fro over the floor of the cabin and up and down through the sagebrush behind it.

He read and wrote in odd minutes, as his body required now and then a respite from the outdoor activities that filled his days; but in that first deep quaffing of the new life, the intervals out of the saddle were brief and given mainly to meals and sleep. As he plunged into books to extract from them whatever facts or philosophy they might hold which he needed to enrich his personality and his usefulness, so he plunged into the life of the Bad Lands seeking to comprehend the emotions and the mental processes, the personalities and the social conditions that made it what it was. With a warm humanity on which the shackles of social prejudice already hung loose, he moved with open eyes and an open heart among the men and women whom the winds of chance had blown together in the valley of the Little Missouri.

They were an interesting and a diverse lot. Closest to the Maltese Cross, in point of situation, were the Eatons, who had established themselves two years previously at an old stage station, five miles south of Little Missouri, on what had been the first mail route between Fort Abraham Lincoln and Fort Keogh. Custer had passed that way on his last, ill-fated expedition, and the ranch bore the name of the Custer Trail in memory of the little army that had camped beside it one night on the way to the Little Big Horn. The two-room shack of cottonwood logs and a dirt roof, which had been the station, was inhabited by calves and chickens who were kept in bounds by the stockade which only a little while before had served to keep the Indians at a distance.

The four Eaton brothers were men of education and family, who had suffered financial reverses and migrated from Pittsburgh, where they lived, to "make their fortunes," as the phrase went, in the Northwest. A wealthy Pennsylvanian named Huidekoper, a lover of good horses, backed Howard at the Custer Trail and another Easterner named Van Brunt started a second ranch with him, known as the "V-Eye," forty miles down the river at the mouth of Beaver Creek; a third, named "Chris" McGee, who was a somewhat smoky light in the murk of Pennsylvania politics, went into partnership with Charles, at another ranch six miles up Beaver. The Custer Trail was headquarters for them all, and at the same time for an endless procession of Eastern friends who came for the hunting. The Eatons kept open house. Travelers wrote about the hospitality that even strangers were certain to find there, and carried away with them the picture of Howard Eaton, "who sat his horse as though he were a centaur and looked a picturesque and noble figure with his clean-shaven cheeks, heavy drooping moustache, sombrero, blue shirt, and neckerchief with flaming ends." About the time Roosevelt arrived, friends who had availed themselves of the Eaton hospitality until they were in danger of losing their self-respect, had prevailed on the reluctant brothers to make "dude-ranching" a business. "Eaton's dudes" became a notable factor in the Bad Lands. You could raise a laugh about them at Bill Williams's saloon when nothing else could wake a smile.

One of the few women up or down the river was living that June at the Custer Trail. She was Margaret Roberts, the wife of the Eatons' foreman, a jovial, garrulous woman, still under thirty, with hair that curled attractively and had a shimmer of gold in it. She was utterly fearless, and was bringing up numerous children, all girls, with a cool disregard of wild animals and wilder men, which, it was rumored shocked her relatives "back East." She had been brought up in Iowa, but ten horses could not have dragged her back.

Four or five miles above the Maltese Cross lived a woman of a different sort who was greatly agitating the countryside, especially Mrs. Roberts. She had come to the Bad Lands with her husband and daughter since Roosevelt's previous visit, and established a ranch on what was known as "Tepee Bottom." Her husband, whose name, for the purposes of this narrative, shall be Cummins, had been sent to Dakota as ranch manager for a syndicate of Pittsburgh men, why, no one exactly knew, since he was a designer of stoves, and, so far as any one could find out, had never had the remotest experience with cattle. He was an excellent but ineffective little man, religiously inclined, and consequently dubbed "the Deacon." Nobody paid very much attention to him, least of all his wife. That lady had drawn the fire of Mrs. Roberts before she had been in the Bad Lands a week. She was a good woman, but captious, critical, complaining, pretentious. She had in her youth had social aspirations which her husband and a little town in Pennsylvania had been unable to gratify. She brought into her life in Dakota these vague, unsatisfied longings, and immediately set to work to remould the manners, customs, and characters of the community a little nearer to her heart's desire. To such an attitude there was, of course, only one reaction possible; and she got it promptly.

Mrs. Roberts, energetic, simple-hearted, vigorous, plain-spoken, was the only woman within a dozen miles, and it was not long before Mrs. Roberts hated Mrs. Cummins as Jeremiah hated Babylon. For Mrs. Cummins was bent on spreading "culture," and Mrs. Roberts was determined that by no seeming acquiescence should it be spread over her.

"Roosevelt was a great visitor," said Howard Eaton in after time. "When he first came out there, he was a quiet sort of a fellow, with not much to say to anybody, but the best kind of a mixer I ever saw."

The Bad Lands no doubt required the ability to mix with all manner of men, for it was all manner of men that congregated there. Roosevelt evaded the saloons but established friendly relations with the men who did not. When he rode to town for his mail or to make purchases at Joe Ferris's new store, he contracted the habit of stopping at the office of the Bad Lands Cowboy, where those who loved conversation more than whiskey had a way of foregathering.

It was there that he came to know Hell-Roaring Bill Jones.

Bill Jones was a personage in the Bad Lands. He was, in fact, more than that. He was (like Roosevelt himself) one of those rare beings who attain mythical proportions even in their lifetime and draw about themselves the legendry of their generation. Bill Jones was the type and symbol of the care-free negation of moral standards in the wild little towns of the frontier, and men talked of him with an awe which they scarcely exhibited toward any symbol of virtue and sobriety. He said things and he did things which even a tolerant observer, hardened to the aspect of life's seamy side, might have felt impelled to call depraved, and yet Bill Jones himself was not depraved. He was, like the community in which he lived, "free an' easy." Morality meant no more to him than grammar. He outraged the one as he outraged the other, without malice and without any sense of fundamental difference between himself and those who preferred to do neither.

The air was full of tales of his extraordinary doings, for he was a fighter with pistols and with fists and had an ability as a "butter" which was all his own and which he used with deadly effect. What his history had been was a secret which he illuminated only fitfully. It was rumored that he had been born in Ireland of rather good stock, and in the course of an argument with an uncle of his with whom he lived had knocked the uncle down. Whether he had killed him the rumors failed to tell, but the fact that Bill Jones had found it necessary "to dust" to America, under an assumed name, suggested several things. Being inclined to violence, he naturally drifted to that part of the country where violence seemed to be least likely to have serious consequences. By a comic paradox, he joined the police force of Bismarck. He casually mentioned the fact one day to Roosevelt, remarking that he had left the force because he "beat the Mayor over the head with his gun one day."

"The Mayor, he didn't mind it," he added, "but the Superintendent of Police guessed I'd better resign."

He was a striking-looking creature, a man who could turn dreams into nightmares, merely by his presence in them. He was rather short of stature, but stocky and powerfully built, with a tremendous chest and long, apelike arms, hung on a giant's shoulders. The neck was a brute's, and the square protruding jaw was in keeping with it. His lips were thin, his nose was hooked like a pirate's, and his keen black eyes gleamed from under the bushy black eyebrows like a grizzly's from a cave. He was not a thing of beauty, but, at the back of his unflinching gaze, humor in some spritely and satanic shape was always disporting itself, and there was, as Lincoln Lang described it, "a certain built-in look of drollery in his face," which made one forget its hardness.

He was feared and, strange to say, he was loved by the very men who feared him. For he was genial, and he could build a yarn that had the architectural completeness of a turreted castle, created out of smoke by some imaginative minstrel of hell. His language on all occasions was so fresh and startling that men had a way of following him about just to gather up the poppies and the nightshade of his exuberant conversation.

As Will Dow later remarked about him, he was "an awfully good man to have on your side if there was any sassing to be done."

Roosevelt was not one of those who fed on the malodorous stories which had gained for their author the further sobriquet of "Foul-mouthed Bill"; but he rather liked Bill Jones. It happened one day, in the Cowboy office that June, that the genial reprobate was holding forth in his best vein to an admiring group of cowpunchers.

Roosevelt, who was inclined to be reserved in the company of his new associates, endured the flow of indescribable English as long as he could. Then, suddenly, in a pause, when the approving laughter had subsided, he began slowly to "skin his teeth."

"Bill Jones," he said, looking straight into the saturnine face, and speaking in a low, quiet voice, "I can't tell why in the world I like you, for you're the nastiest-talking man I ever heard."

Bill Jones's hand fell on his "six-shooter." The cowpunchers, knowing their man, expected shooting. But Bill Jones did not shoot. For an instant the silence in the room was absolute. Gradually a sheepish look crept around the enormous and altogether hideous mouth of Bill Jones. "I don't belong to your outfit, Mr. Roosevelt," he said, "and I'm not beholden to you for anything. All the same, I don't mind saying that mebbe I've been a little too free with my mouth."

They became friends from that day.

If Roosevelt had tried to avoid the Marquis de Mores on his trips to the Marquis's budding metropolis in those June days, he would scarcely have succeeded. The Marquis was the most vivid feature of the landscape in and about Medora. His personal appearance would have attracted attention in any crowd. The black, curly hair, the upturned moustaches, waxed to needle-points, the heavy eyelids, the cool, arrogant eyes, made an impression which, against that primitive background, was not easily forgotten. His costume, moreover, was extraordinary to the point of the fantastic. It was the Marquis who always seemed to wear the widest sombrero, the loudest neckerchief. He went armed like a battleship. A correspondent of the Mandan Pioneer met him one afternoon returning from the pursuit of a band of cattle which had stampeded. "He was armed to the teeth," ran his report. "A formidable-looking belt encircled his waist, in which was stuck a murderous-looking knife, a large navy revolver, and two rows of cartridges, and in his hand he carried a repeating rifle."

A man who appeared thus dressed and accoutered would either be a master or a joke in a community like Medora. There were several reasons why he was never a joke. His money had something to do with it, but the real reason was, in the words of a contemporary, that "when it came to a show-down, the Marquis was always there." He completely dominated the life of Medora. His hand was on everything, and everything, it seemed, belonged to him. It was quite like "Puss in Boots." His town was really booming and was crowding its rival on the west bank completely out of the picture. The clatter of hammers on new buildings sounded, in the words of the editor of the Cowboy, "like a riveting machine." The slaughter-house had already been expanded. From Chicago came a score or more of butchers, from the range came herds of cattle to be slaughtered. The side-track was filled with empty cars of the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company, which, as they were loaded with dressed beef, were coupled on fast east-bound trains. The Marquis, talking to newspaper correspondents, was glowing in his accounts of the blooming of his desert rose. He announced that it already had six hundred inhabitants. Another, calmer witness estimated fifty. The truth was probably a hundred, including the fly-by-nights. Unquestionably, they made noise enough for six hundred.

The Marquis, pending the completion of his house, was living sumptuously in his private car, somewhat, it was rumored, to the annoyance of his father-in-law, who was said to see no connection between the rough life of a ranchman, in which the Marquis appeared to exult, and the palace on wheels in which he made his abode. But he was never snobbish. He had a friendly word for whoever drifted into his office, next to the company store, and generally "something for the snake-bite," as he called it, that was enough to bring benedictions to the lips of a cowpuncher whose dependence for stimulants was on Bill Williams's "Forty-Mile Red-Eye." To the men who worked for him he was extraordinarily generous, and he was without vindictiveness toward those who, since the killing of Luffsey, had openly or tacitly opposed him. He had a grudge against Gregor Lang, whose aversion to titles and all that went with them had not remained unexpressed during the year that had intervened since that fatal June 26th, but if he held any rancor toward Merrifield or the Ferrises, he did not reveal it. He was learning a great deal incidentally.

Shortly before Roosevelt's arrival from the Chicago convention, the Marquis had stopped at the Maltese Cross one day for a chat with Sylvane. He was dilating on his projects, "spreading himself" on his dreams, but in his glowing vision of the future, he turned, for once, a momentary glance of calm analysis on the past.

"If I had known a year ago what I know now," he said rather sadly, "Riley Luffsey would never have been killed."